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Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band. Rob Jovanovic
Читать онлайн.Название Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007396191
Автор произведения Rob Jovanovic
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Wayne Carson Thompson’s ‘Sandman’ did little to rouse the first side, though Chuck Neese and Mac Gayden’s (of Nashville band the Sliders) ‘She Shot A Hole In My Soul’ did lift proceedings. Of the two Penn-Oldham compositions, ‘People Gonna Talk’ and ‘I Met Her In Church’, it was the latter that became the highlight of the album. Originally written as ‘I Met Him In Church’ for the Sweet Inspirations, the anticipated gospel choir on the chorus lifts the song to new heights while Oldham’s glorious piano playing is a pleasure to listen to. ‘Rock Me Baby’ was a B.B. King song that did exactly as it promised – it rocked – and proved to be quite a departure from the Box Tops’ usual mixture of country, pop, gospel and soul. While not the best song on the album, one of the most notable was ‘I Can Dig It’, which was the first Chilton composition to be recorded, and which fitted well with some of the funkier Box Tops songs of the period.
The rest of 1968 was taken up with touring and then the band returned to Memphis. Chilton also returned home with a pregnant girlfriend, Suzie Green, whom he had met on tour in Dallas. The couple were married on Chilton’s eighteenth birthday, 28 December 1968, in the Chilton family living room. Soon after a son was born, Timothee. According to a friend, his parents were dismayed at his ‘taking on the responsibility of marriage at such a young age’. They were quickly proved right: the marriage was short lived, and Timothee would spend his early years going back and forth between his mother and Chilton’s parents’ care. Chilton had done a lot of growing up in a very short space of time. He was still only a teenager but had a wife, a child and was the figurehead of a million-selling band.
After a couple of tours, Chilton was invited to visit the Beach Boys in Los Angeles in early 1969. Gary Talley recalled that for his twenty-first birthday, ‘Bill Cunningham, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson went out and bought me a birthday cake and brought it to my hotel room. The Beach Boys and Bill sang “Happy Birthday” to me.’ Now Chilton was staying at Dennis Wilson’s house taking acid and having a merry old time until another of Dennis’s friends decided to move in for a while. ‘I was on the road meeting people like the Beach Boys, the Doors, Wilson Pickett, everybody,’ says Chilton. ‘Carl Wilson taught me to play the guitar. I was like the youngest Wilson brother, and I went to California and spent some time with them. I stayed at Brian’s house a few times, and that’s how I got to meet Charles Manson. Of course no one knew what he was really up to. We were all there together in this really fabulous Malibu beach community in Dennis’s log cabin, and suddenly this guy shows up with a harem full of beautiful girls and starts playing songs at us. Occasionally things got a little uncomfortable.’ On one occasion Chilton was sent out to fetch the groceries, much to his chagrin, and when he returned without the milk a scene was caused by some of Manson’s family. ‘[I] started thinking at around that time – hey, these are kinda strange vibes. Let’s leave. I’m not too sure about this Charlie.’
Most of 1969 had again been spent on the road. The contract for a show on 31 March shows that the band was paid 2500 dollars for two forty-five minute sets. Interestingly the contract is signed by Chilton rather than Roy Mack. ‘We turned into a road band and I was paid twice as much as anybody else in the band,’ says Chilton. ‘I didn’t want to rock the boat because all I would have to do would be go back to school if I jumped out of there. It was a very bad environment, on the road with those people that couldn’t play, they didn’t wanna play, they wouldn’t play, and so we were crummy as shit everywhere. It was hard on me, it polluted my mind, I’ll never get over it musically.’
The most newsworthy moment of the summer was the July 1969 landing on the moon. Alex Chilton had an apartment in Memphis now, and he and Suzie invited some friends over to watch the historic event. Photographer Michael O’Brien, Andy Hummel and Steve Rhea all attended. ‘That was huge to us,’ recalls Rhea. ‘It had been a major shock to us when the Soviets put up Sputnik; it made a big impression on us. Then when Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade…’
This was the first time that Andy Hummel met Chilton. He went along as a friend of O’Brien’s. ‘We went over there the night the first lunar landing took place and dropped acid,’ says Hummel. ‘It was Purple Haze. Then we just watched the little LEM module sitting there on the lunar surface on TV. I never really got off. I don’t think it was very good acid. Nothing like the stuff we later got in Knoxville! I suppose we were a little in awe of Alex at first. I mean, he was someone who had actually made it. He was a proper rock’n’roll star and that was the ultimate thing a person could be!’
By late summer things had started to change for Chilton. The Box Tops were slowly coming to an end, he realised that his marriage to Suzie had been a mistake, he started having an affair with Vera Ellis, and then he decided to move to New York with her.
Vera Ellis had met Chilton the previous year through their mutual friend Earl Smith, who was also a friend of Chris Bell and Andy Hummel at MUS. ‘Alex was with the Box Tops, touring quite a bit at the time,’ she recalls. ‘He was very laid back, intelligent and open minded, he appeared to be confident and sure of himself but not proud to be in the Box Tops. They were too commercial; the music embarrassed him and caused him to feel he was looked down on by other musicians. He was living with his parents when he was in town. Earl and I dropped by to visit Alex and we became friends.
‘I spent many days and nights with Alex at his parents’ home on Montgomery Street. We would go to the Sharecropper, a Memphis club, to listen to Sid’s band. Alex’s family was very political, liberal Democrats, ahead of their time in Memphis.’ After Chilton and Green had separated, he started seeing Ellis and at the end of the summer they relocated to New York. ‘They [Chilton and Green] didn’t live together as man and wife very long,’ adds Ellis. ‘Suzie and I were thrown together quite often because of Timothee, and we were always friendly. My affair with Alex was not secret or hidden and he was not living with Suzie at the time.’
In September Bill Cunningham became the latest Box Top to quit and go back to college. That autumn the Box Tops became the only white band to appear in Memphis at the Coliseum in front of the all-black audience as part of WDIA’s Starlight Revue. But tensions among the band continued, morale was lower than ever as they were continually banned from playing on most of their own records and Chilton was getting double their money.
To top it all, what would become the final album, Dimensions, was not even produced by Dan Penn. Penn had irrevocably fallen out with Moman and high-tailed it to Nashville. Production duties passed to Moman and house band member Tommy Cogbill. Penn’s absence also meant a lack of song-writing material from him and Oldham, which meant both a dearth of new commercial material but also offered a chance for Chilton to get more of his own compositions on the album. The mood in the studio was quite different for these final sessions. ‘I never huddled with Dan Penn to pick the material,’ says Chilton. ‘He’d just come in and say, “Do it” and “Do it like this”.’ Dan had his agenda and he didn’t care what I thought. I was just the artist and I was there to do what he told me to do. Chips was very much more of a libertarian. He would come into the studio and say, “Well, what should we do next?”’
Dimensions was issued in September 1969 to precede yet another bout of touring. The album did include some performances by the musicians in the band and started off on a very promising note with another Wayne Carson Thompson song, ‘Soul Deep’. Sounding very much like a Neil Diamond song (and Diamond was recording at American around this time), it was possibly the best Box Tops song since their debut album and it reached the top twenty. Chilton showed vocal versatility with his gentle reading of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’ (which had already been a hit for the Tremeloes) and then going from the sublime to the ridiculous he stomped through ‘Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March’ which was, yes, a march. When issued as a single, it was banned on some radio stations because of its lyric which extolled the virtues of the world’s oldest profession. The lack of Penn-Oldham songs helped Chilton to get three of his own songs included on the album: ‘Together’,